A year ago Seattle received a slap in the face. The sting is gone, but homelessness and traffic remain.

Is Amazon a bad actor? 45,000 employees in the city and $250 million in state tax revenues aren’t bad. And not just any employees but the best developers, program managers and creative professionals in the world. More than half of the developers are foreign born. They bring new ideas, culture, restaurants, and entertainment. There’s a lot to like about what has happened here.

The pearl clutching from anxious Seattleites goes beyond traffic and homelessness, but those are the biggies. We all point fingers at our favorite ecommerce company. But to me this isn’t an Amazon problem, it’s a leadership problem. After HQ2 was announced Jenny Durkan told other mayors that the growth happened too fast. I would counter that the city responded too slow.

The jobs and tax revenue are the greatest opportunity the city has ever had. In 10 years the city increased its tax revenues from $4B to $5B, outpacing population growth by 12%. Not a bad trade. And Durkan, Murray, and regional govt. entities got approvals on traffic projects because of general prosperity: $3.3B tunnel, $5.5B floating bridge, and a $54B light rail project. These are things Seattleites have been begging for since the 1980s.

But not so with homelessness. It’s an old Seattle problem that has gotten much worse. Seattle has the nation’s 3rd highest homeless rate in absolute terms and the highest rate in relative terms. There are dozens of strategies. Rapid rehousing and diversion are debated in newspapers and forums. But it’s not the job of the electorate to write the homelessness strategy.

Homelessness makes me profoundly sad. Yesterday a family of four, the youngest no older than 5 years old, was panhandling outside of our office. That was a shocker. I regularly have to wake a man who sleeps in a building entryway. How did this become normal?

Seattle’s greatest missed opportunity is not the Seattle Commons or Forward Thrust; It’s the opportunity to take care of 12,500 homeless people in King County. The head tax was a ham handed approach to deal with it. It was a taxing mechanism with zero vision. Amazon, Tableau, Google, Facebook, Zillow and other major employers would love to help solve this issue, but they want a collaborative effort, not an ambush. So would voters. This isn’t a tax problem, it’s a leadership problem.

If she could solve Seattle homelessness it would cement Durkan’s legacy in Seattle. If she can’t, I hope another leader is ready to step up and take on the city’s biggest opportunity.

Amazon’s growth in Seattle made the city the envy of 238 cities, if not the whole world. Solving homelessness would raise the city’s stature far beyond the impact of any tech firm.

You have probably heard of Dave Marriott. Even if you don’t know his name you know his work. He’s the guy who worked on the high profile crisis management cases in Seattle for 40 years: Alaska Airlines flight 261, Amanda Knox, Nordstrom union busting and maybe 100 others.

Dave died last week and we lost a local legend. I was lucky to work for him for three years and with him for more than 20 years. He’s no longer here to help young folks coming up. But there are hundreds of people, myself included, who would like to share his insights. To that end I list here Dave’s rules for PR and life. In no particular order.

Control: Dave played narrative control like a chess game. Never more impressively than with helping Amanda Knox. He showed that not communicating can be more powerful than communicating.

Calm: You wouldn’t know it to look at him but Dave was a really calm guy. He operated at one speed. When everyone around you is crazed, its useful to have a level headed professional calling the shots.

Enjoyment: He worked on very real crises but he never got bent out of shape about work. He valued his friends and laughter above work. He was famous for shepherding us young folks down the stairs for a shirtsleeve tequila bracer across the street. He would spend days fly fishing the Elwha with his friends. His wife and son were his universe.

It takes time to get to know someone and even longer to understand him within the larger contexts of an industry and a city. I could apply a lot of kind adjectives to Dave about professionalism and insights. but his personality and true north were laughter, relationships and trust. David was straightforward, honest and friendly. These are the things that stick with me. He helped a lot of people get started in PR. I hope his legacy will inspire many more to come.

]]>http://owenmedia.com/2018/05/07/david-marriott-1943-2018/feed/0Seattle’s Transformation Mythhttp://owenmedia.com/2018/05/01/seattles-transformation-myth/
http://owenmedia.com/2018/05/01/seattles-transformation-myth/#commentsTue, 01 May 2018 18:31:38 +0000http://owenmedia.com/?p=1553The Seattle Times published another hand-wringer recently about the death of old Seattle. About 1,000 people move to Seattle every week, pushing out the lumberjacks. The loss of Seattle is topic number one in cloud town. Traffic and homelessness are the leading concerns but there are plenty of gripes underneath those two.

The argument misses the larger trend of newcomers trying to transform Seattle. Few people have tried harder than Seattle newcomers. The Suquamish tribe and its ancestors had a good thing going for 10,000 years. Then Arthur Denny arrived, appropriating land for mills, stores and banks. Then the Yukon gold prospectors. Then the Boeing engineers…

So today we have the brightest software developers in the world coming to Seattle to start their careers. More than 50% of them are foreign born. So the level of isolation native Seattleites feel goes beyond education and income to include language and culture.

Suquamish culture was predicated on a transformation narrative. According to Suquamish myth there once was a world before humans where everything had the power and ability to take any form or do anything. Eventually, a firm order was imposed on the world by The Changer, enabling human beings to take their place in the world. Today many long-time Seattle residents would appreciate a firm order on Seattle’s old way of life.

Seattle’s recurring theme is that newcomers bend the environment to their needs. The Montlake cut, the Denny Regrade, the floating bridges, the Highway 99 tunnel, a $54 billion light rail system, and the Amazon biospheres are vanities of commerce.

Amid the grumbling of the Seattle residents living in financial stasis, there is also recognition that newcomers add dimensions beyond wealth and traffic. This is the unsung benefit of Seattle’s boom decade. New ideas, perspectives and ways of living are coming to the area. Newcomers fervently believe in the transformation myth. That’s what brought them here. And they exhibit what the Suquamish called the power and ability to take any form or do anything.

So welcome newcomers. You reinforce the myth. Seattle may be welcoming 1,000 people per week, but the outlook, both native and newcomer, hasn’t changed.

]]>http://owenmedia.com/2018/03/09/pcc-rising-at-rainier-square/feed/0Jay Rockey 1928-2018http://owenmedia.com/2018/03/06/jay-rockey-1928-2018/
http://owenmedia.com/2018/03/06/jay-rockey-1928-2018/#commentsWed, 07 Mar 2018 04:18:10 +0000http://owenmedia.com/?p=1510Forever Seattle’s grand old man of PR, Jay Rockey, died this week. I extol his greatness here so that others may benefit.

He is most famous for launching (and naming) the Seattle World’s Fair in 1962. His team secured 50,000 print articles including two Life Magazine cover stories. He then started a PR agency that became the Northwest’s largest and most respected (perhaps even to this day).

What made him great was how he treated others. Friendly, optimistic and ready to step back and let others take the spotlight and the credit. He earned remarkable loyalty from clients and employees. I was one of the later when I worked in Rockey’s Portland office long ago. There was strict adherence to style guides, formats and client service. But there was always respect. It meant a lot.

I’ve worked with a lot of great people, but Jay Rockey meant a lot to my industry and to me. He won’t be forgotten.

]]>http://owenmedia.com/2018/03/06/jay-rockey-1928-2018/feed/0Relevance and timing are the new creativityhttp://owenmedia.com/2018/02/06/relevance-and-timing-are-the-new-creativity/
http://owenmedia.com/2018/02/06/relevance-and-timing-are-the-new-creativity/#commentsWed, 07 Feb 2018 00:33:51 +0000http://owenmedia.com/?p=1467Tide owned the Super Bowl by spoofing typical TV ads. David Harbour, from Stranger Things, delivered the Tide punch lines perfectly. And now the ad is part of the national conversation. Just like the Budweiser Frogs and Wendy’s “Where’s the Beef?” ads. The Super Bowl is unique in that it still rewards creativity. The rest of the ad industry has shifted from creativity toward relevance and timing.

This week one of Seattle’s leading creative advertising agencies closed. Wexley School for Girls has been around for 15 years. The founders decided to hang it up because the nature of the advertising industry shifted from creative excellence toward analytics excellence. It’s far more important to get your message in front of the right person at the right time than it is to have great creative. And it turns out, the cost of getting analytics right can easily exceed the creative process if not the production process. This explains the rise of analytics agencies in Seattle like Add3 and Point It.

Today’s holy grail is to present an ad in a user’s Facebook feed that not only coincides with her car purchasing but displays the car she is seriously considering. That’s hard to do. Some would say more difficult than coming up with a Super Bowl commercial for Tide.

Compare web analytics with media buying, its predecessor. The former is led by quantitative people using Google Analytics or Adobe Creative Cloud. The latter was led by media buyers who picked media outlets for campaigns. Today computers do the picking for you in programmatic buys. In this way web and mobile have inverted the traditional agency where the analysts are now at the top of the organization, just above the creatives.

Creativity isn’t going away, it’s showing up in different places and in different ways like in-house marketing, product development and social media marketing. For example, Amazon’s Super Bowl ad was produced, in part, by Amazon’s in-house marketing agency, D1. Yes, Wexley is closing. Creative agencies are changing. But creativity will continue as an unstoppable force and show up in places we didn’t expect. Long live creatives.

I stepped into the future at Amazon Go today. Everyone in Seattle knows that Amazon introduced the fully automated store check out a year ago and opened it to the public this week. It’s located at street level at the company headquarters. It’s attracting Amazon fanboys of all stripes, including Amazon partners visiting from all over the world. Lots of selfies and fingering of the store merchandise.

I loved the mobile app download, registration and store entry process. It was a little scary how easy it was for the app to identify all of the credit cards I already have on file with Amazon. The download and store entry took less than a minute. All very satisfying.

You use the mobile app QR code to gain entry through the store’s turnstiles. Then the image sensors take over. The ceiling is packed with image sensors and radio frequency transponders that are watching your every move. This is hardware far beyond the means of a corner convenience store. Even a large chain of convenience stores couldn’t justify this against the savings of firing every cashier.

I grabbed chocolate, cookies and a falafel dinner kit and wandered out the door. It didn’t feel like shoplifting. It felt like magic. So fast. Fifteen seconds later, out on the sidewalk, I got a notification that I was charged $27 and the duration of my visit was 7 minutes and 26 seconds. I could have completed the trip in less than a minute if I didn’t spend time checking out the store. That’s pretty incredible for an activity most people do one or two times a day.

I don’t know if it will scale or make sense for selling low cost items like mixed nuts. Eventually it probably will. For now I’m glad the hometown bookseller decided to build the world’s most advanced store and open it up to the public.

]]>http://owenmedia.com/2018/01/23/amazon-go-mixed-nuts/feed/02018 Client Coveragehttp://owenmedia.com/2018/01/17/2018-client-coverage/
http://owenmedia.com/2018/01/17/2018-client-coverage/#commentsWed, 17 Jan 2018 18:21:25 +0000http://owenmedia.com/?p=1431At Owen Media, we’re fortunate to work with some of the most influential technology companies in the world. Our media relations efforts focus on developing and telling stories that resonate with editors from print and Web-based outlets, across to television broadcast producers.

Here is a list of articles we’ve secured for our clients since the beginning of the year (see earlier blog posts for prior years):

Coffee has always been a stated subject of this blog, along with tech, PR and Seattle. Until now it’s been difficult to find a relevant way to discuss it. To the brave friends who allowed me to document their holiday cheer, thank you for officially bringing coffee and pastry into my job. See you next December.

]]>http://owenmedia.com/2017/12/27/a-better-world-through-pastry/feed/05 Things I’d Make Alexa Do For Me At Workhttp://owenmedia.com/2017/12/01/5-things-id-make-alexa-do-for-me-at-work/
http://owenmedia.com/2017/12/01/5-things-id-make-alexa-do-for-me-at-work/#commentsFri, 01 Dec 2017 18:22:20 +0000http://owenmedia.com/?p=1399Amazon announced Alexa at work this week, an effort to put Amazon Echo devices in offices. Here’s how much better work life could be with the dulcet toned assistant.

Take a meeting. Why am I on all these conference calls? Alexa can take conference calls on my behalf. She’s friendlier and can call upon stores of info from the interwebs. Far more helpful than me.

Make me look busy. I can utter some nonsense to Alexa like, “I’m busy,” which is code for her to turn off my butt rock, change my app from Facebook to Excel and make my phone ring as if I’m really getting a phone call.

Reorder pastry. I don’t like an empty snack cupboard, especially when I have a cup of hot coffee in hand but no pastry to go with it. She can take orders for twice baked croissants and flaky crullers.

Passive aggressively tell co workers to do the dishes. Alexa will say things in passing like, “Are you going to clean that cup?” Or “These dishes aren’t going to clean themselves.”

Hire and fire employees. Can you imagine being fired by Alexa? Yeesh. But what a relief to the employer (says an employer). The scary thing is that you know this will happen in the next 5 years.

It’s a bright future.I can’t wait until the modern conveniences come to my office. Now if I could only get her to pronounce my name.